THE WIRE must be the most anticipated thing I have ever experienced . IMDb legend Bob The Moo offered to loan me the series on DVD since he was dying to know what I would make of it . Preassures of life led to me postponing his generosity . Luckily BBC 2 decided to start broadcasting the show which meant Bob saved him and myself some money in postage and packing while anyone who hasn't subscribed to the satellite channel FX could now watch the series from the very beginning
It's a good show but it's a very acquired taste . Even people who love it have warned newbies " Please watch up to the third episode then if you're not compelled by it then don't bother " and that's very honest of them . Honest compared to the occasional article on the TV pages of broadsheet newspapers that fuel the hyperbole of " Greatest TV show ever ... breaks the boundaries of television forever etc etc " which raises expectations that can not be met
It certainly has a lot of strong points . It's astoundingly intelligent and subtle . It would have been very easy for David Simon to make a gritty , hard hitting in yer face show with explicit sex and violence and shoot outs between the cops and drug gangs three times an episode but Simon has done something entirely different - he's made a sublime show . By this I mean not a lot happens on the surface plot wise but it's not a plot driven show - it's character driven and Simon introduces the characters gradually without spelling anything out . Idris Elba is credited third on the opening credits but it's not until well in to the second half of the season that you're able to work out how his character relates to the plot
The subtlety extends to many aspects of the show . There's the old cliché of characters having a game of chess while planning their next move but it's so well done you forget it's actually a cliché . There are of course clichéd scenes of cops beating up suspects but at least they're shown to tear up photos of the suspect on their arrest and then claim they resisted arrest . Perhaps the most subtle scene is the one everyone remembers and has entered television legend where a bunch of cops investigate a shooting , you know the scene there's no dialogue apart from the F word and " mothereffer " and you have no idea what it's about until they find a bullet and the audience are left to realise what the scene is about
Despite the intelligence and thought gone in to the show I certainly wouldn't claim its the greatest show ever or even the greatest show produced by HBO . One problem is that it uses different directors . Peter Medak brought a very strong cinema verite style to his episode while a couple of episodes later Clark Johnson had a slo mo sequence with a pumping gangsta soundtrack . Every director brings their own style to an episode which can be fairly jarring sometimes . Another problem for me is that my favourite American show of all time is OZ so I can never think of the actors as not being Bricks Wrangler , Clayton Hughes etc . Perhaps the biggest problem is that it's maybe too intelligent , subtle and character driven ! Thankfully BBC 2 broadcast it every weekday night otherwise I'd have lost track of everything if THE WIRE was shown once a week
Certainly I can indeed recommend the series and will be staying with it over it's entire run , but I can't honestly say it is something that breaks television boundaries or class it the greatest show ever . In fact such comments do the THE WIRE more harm than good